The Philadelphia Union’s expansion draft picks had roughly the same base salaries as the Sounders’ first ten, just over $600,000. Three of them, Jaqua, Evans and Riley played signficant minutes. Three never saw the field; Khano Smith, Jarrod Smith and Jeff Parke.

The mess surrounding USL-1 and the newly minted, but not yet approved NASL…

My take: Pure fantasy, but bear with me. Two 2nd tier leagues, one east of the Mississippi, one west, similar to AAA baseball. No interleague play. The two points winners and the two playoff winners(if they have playoffs) get US Open bids. The last 4(or 6) 2nd tier bids are earned via play-in matches between the next 4(or 6) highest point earners in each league.

The MLS Collective Bargaining Agreement(CBA): Would free agency mean the end of single entity?

My take: I don’t see why. It would just be a tweak, albeit a major one, in options for out of contract players.

More durable, and more importantly for teams/tournaments, better to display advertising on.

The Portland Timbers in 2011 will be playing on turf, simply because grass can’t grow well in the stadium’s bowl, and football will be played there in the fall. You saw Robertson Field for the Sounder/Dynamo game, right? It was pitifully poor. Can you honestly say a poor grass field is better than an excellent atrificial one?

The conditions of the Dynamo/Sounders game was more about a bad relationship with your landlord, not about grass. University of Houston could care less about the Dynamo because they know the Dynamo dont have another option until they get a stadium.

It’d kill the Canadian-ness of the CFL. BMO would need to be able to fit a 110 yard by 60 yard field with plenty of space at the ends and on the sides. Plus they need about another 10 yards on both sides of the width and about 15-20 yards on the length for safety regulations.

The turf these days is so much better than when people first started complaining about soccer being played on it.
I was kicking on the local field, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t grass. Ball moves a little faster on the ground. I personally think the bounce factor is in people’s heads….go ahead flame me. 😉
Plus I would rather see that field at QWest, then the chewed up mess where the ball wouldn’t even roll…it must have rained 15 inches this November in Seattle and the Seahawks and the Sounders had home games.
Non factor for me, even prefer the turf slightly ( oh the blasphemy ! ).

I recieved Torvald’s original email promoting Linux, and Jimmy Conrad, you are not Linus Torvald. I like the open source idea, but you need good ideas to start with.

So let me get this straight, with virtually every team having a shot of winning the title, the average team was in the 15k range for fans with TV being nothing. Now you want to reduce the league to 10 teams that can win it all, leaving the other 10 teams to fight for a chance to win it all next year if they do great in their league, which is actually mediocre overall.
What will the bottom 10 teams attendance be ? It can’t go negative, that is a positive.
Why do people like relagation over a parity league which saw LA go from last to second, New York go from second to last ?
LA would have been in MLS2 this year, why is that good for me as a fan ?
I could have seen New York twice as much, why is that good for me as a fan ?
I assume in his structure there are not playoffs, why is that good for me as a fan ?
Bizzare.

Why are the writers on this site so anti Field Turf? Having watched many live PDL games and many televised MLS games on grass pitches and on FT, I can see little difference in the play of the ball.
The “bounce factor” is different, I will admit. With FT you get a consistent bounce regardless of the weather. With grass, the bounce varies game to game depending on rain, temperature, the length of the grass, the baldness of the field due to use, etc. So in my mind, having a FT pitch makes more sense from a coaching/playing standpoint.
Having played on both pitches, I think that on any given day FT offers a better knee and ankle experience than grass. I know that every time I step on a FT pitch the grab of my cleats will be the same and the shock absorption by the pitch will be consistent, lessening the damage to my aging joints. With grass fields, a warm dry stretch turns the field into concrete, the day-today climate affects the grab on my cleats, requiring different studs or maybe no studs at all. Not to mention the effects over time to the smoothness/flatness of the field itself.
In places like Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Minnesota, Rochester, Montreal, etc, FT makes more sense because of the extreme variations in weather. Having FT means that games can be played in adverse consitions with much less prep. FT is also more cost effective for multi-sport communities because soccer, lacrosse, and American football can all use the field in a weekend with no damage to the surface. A grass pitch would be utterly destroyed following a game of each. This type of cost-conscious thinking will be in place for the next few years as we dig out of the recession.
This year’s MLS cup looked great on the clean, beautiful, and consistent green pitch at Seattle. Having a packed Qwest Field was awesome as well. Nobody’s play looked to be negatively affected by the FT throughout the game (anything stated by Galaxy players to the contrary would most likely be an excuse). Given the constant pounding of rain in the Pacific Northwest, could you imagine how bad a grass field would have been for MLS Cup? Not to mention how cold?
Jimmy Conrad’s ideas were ok, but a 20 team first division is ideal for a combined Canada/US league given our massive size. I’m feeling the concept of MLS1 and 2 with relegation for the bottom teams. I kind of wrote something similar in July: http://centraliowalax.blogspot.com/2009/07/fixing-us-soccer-part-1.html

Have to say, this site is WAY over the top about field turf. Always makes me wonder if Kartik had an injury on a FT field in his past (sorry if you did – any injury on any field sucks). Games I’ve heard described here as unwatchable because of FT were thoroughly enjoyable to me to watch. I just don’t get it.

The ideal soccer league should be disigned not from preconceived ideas,but designed to make sense.
lets see: if we were to debate the important pionts to design a league specially design for this country we would have to ask ourself a few questions and see what answers we can come up with.

-relationship between owners and league
-salary cap
-Promotion and relegation?
(if yes to pro/rel)
-single table?how many clubs on first div?
-playoffs or not
-how many teams to the playoffs
-how many divisions
-how many clubs per division
-how to accomplish youth development
-how to encourage soccer specific stadiums

This is my view :

-relationship between owners and league
The way it is in pretty much all the main soccer leagues in the world.The owner or entity in charge is in control of the club and therefore responsible for the club socces or failure.The league directors take care of the administrative and disciplinary issues but dont control the desicions the club makes

-salary cap?
None.
There is no salary cap in the rest of the soccer world against a US league will have to compete if it want to keep their talent.Not to mention this league would also have to compete against the other traditional american sports wich have the best talent on their fields.
Having a salary cap only benefits the owners.It takes away one on the main advantages that a US soccer league should have in order to atract the best soccer talent in the world; money.

-Promotion and relegation?
If we dont use this system,there is basically no way we coulnt leave out about 30 States with no club to represent them.
It is a system use in all the important leagues in the world.It has proven to be suscesfull.
It will get us on the same page with the internationall soccer comunity.
by opening the door for lot of smaller clubs on the lower divisions,we will be present in all those markets that none of the big 4 are.
we will give comunities a chance of watching ther clubs live,not on tv like the mayority of the country have to do with traditional american sports.I could go on and on.promotion and relegation is a YES.

-single table?how many clubs on first div?
well, this two issues are definitly related.The model for the best soccer leagues in the world is 20 clubs,so we should have at least that many. However if we design the league tu specifically suit us,and consider our size compared to the other countries,we could probably have a few more clubs on our first div.
I like the idea of the single table,but the distances to travel would increase the costs of runing the clubs and play also a factor on the fitness of players.So East and west conferences make sense.
14 clubs per division
winner of each division qualifyo to Conc Champions
first 3 per division qualify to playoffs
divisional play would be 26 games(13 home and 13 away)
playoffs would be 6 clubs to play minileague of home and away games.
that would be 10 playoff games(5 home and 5 away)
winner of playoffs qualifies to CCL.
Total games : 26 regular seasson+10 playoffs=36 games(2 games less than the standard world league wich plays 19 home+19 away=38) Right on target!!
Bottom 2 clubs per table are relegated to div 2. (total relegated clubs 4 out 28)it could also be 3 per div=6 out of 28. we could debate that.

-how many divisions?
Depending on the clubs that afiliate.Ideally a lot do!! It will depend on the standard set to do so.
Standards should be set with the philosophy to have as many clubs affiliated as posible and adjusted periodically to adapt to the changing reality of the league
2nd division should have 4 conferences.On a lower division the clubs make less money so in order to keep expenses low, doble the number of conferences will make travel distances shorter.
The structure should be piramydal with the first div on top, and wide at the buttom(taking all that groung that the big 4 forgetts about)

-how to accomplish youth development
having diferent club levels is the best way to accomplish that.Isted of trining in an academy,lot of youth will have the chance of playing regularly on lower div clubs,with a lower level of stress than the upper divisions,but playing for real important points.There is no better experience than that.

-how to encourage soccer specific stadiums
making it a must have if you want to be on 1st div will do it.Of course there would have to be exeptions at the begining.When the league get big it will be extended to 1st and 2nd.It could be a 5,000/10,000 capacity,but soccer specific